I've been working on my xbox, and I'm trying to fix it without sending it to MS for them to rip me off. Anyways, I've been having problems with it telling me the disks may be damaged or dirty, etc. I'm pretty sure my dvd rom is effed to say the least (completely off track, I tried to fix it but the track is ruined), but if you don't have a disk in there it should be able to run the OS fine, right? I was playing some music I saved on my xbox when it was working, and the system started freezing/skipping. It looked like it was trying to read a disk in the dvd even though there wasn't anything in it. Would the faulty dvd mess with the HD? Should I just disconnect the dvd completely until I get a new one?

Well, a bad DVD drive can cause freezing as well but it sounds like the DVD drive. Hard drive issues are often (but not always) accompinied by noises. I did have a problem with one of my xboxes powering off and freezing and after much agravation it turned out that all that needed to be replaced was the IDE cable. Since then its worked just fine.